Do you know which tagging softwares still use Gracenote database? Does e.g. TuneUp use Gracenote?

I think Tuneup did use Gracenote, but I believe they also ran into financial difficulties.
They have new ownership, but the app I downloaded this week was full of PUPs,
and after Malwarebytes had cleaned up the mess, I could not get the product to run.

Gracenote now have deals with Sony, microsoft/Xbox, apple/itunes and google/play.
I have come to the conclusion that we are just no longer going to be able to find access to their service for free any more.

Arguably it was the users who built up the tagging/fingerprint Gracenote database and we will just need to build up another one. Musicbrainz seem to have made a good start.

I think, You are right, whitesocks. Maybe Gracenote wants to get money now (and will get it via these new contracts), but not only Gracenote. I have experienced that now with 3 other music-platforms and filehosters: Mixlr, Droplr and Rapidshare.

Arguably it was the users who built up the tagging/fingerprint Gracenote database and we will just need to build up another one. Musicbrainz seem to have made a good start.

that probably is true, especially in the early days (along with other services that helped fill up that system - which is why it generally does so well for old material). and with so many things using musicbrainz ids now (and having done so for ages e.g. last.fm coverart lookup), even just getting the basic tag handling support into the player for handling will be a bonus to start with as that opens up a number of possibilities as well as interoperability improvements with other software / services which we weren't able to do previously.

and i know that whatever we do, there are going to be people who despise it, but as the Gracenote termination applies to _all_ Winamp clients (even those on 2.x installs), sometimes a change and a fresh start on what is used will be better in the long run, though only time will tell. and it's not like people need to rely on the information which is pulled down from whatever service(s) end up being used since most aspects can be manually overridden (just like has been able to be done for years).

With the stop on proper winamp development Gracenote was the only reason I still had it installed

I have tried all the alternative autotagging solutions I could find this last week but none of them comes close to the gracenote implementation in winamp, especially concerning lots of seperate files. In fact for most of the alternatives unless you have a specific album to search by it just does not happen.

I should have pointed out that puddletag also has the "only add missing tags" feature.

and personally I have had a lot of exp tagging and auto-tagging via differing apps, and imo, gracenote was no better or no worse than anything else. now I can't speak specifically to Japanese pan flute music, and not too deep on classical, but for normal mainstream pop / rock / rap / etc... this is to me, a lateral move with no big downside, other than I won't have an app to access gracenote at all with; but I have np with that given the fiscal realities that have now been made plain, I think people need to get over it, its not that big a deal.

It's a bit ironic, but the Winamp auto tagger was the best tagging system I ever used. I would guess about 95% of the information was correct. Same for the Audio CD tagging system, Gracenote did a good job for me.

I've used several different tools for ripping/tagging during the years and from my personal experience, I must say, that the results of other databases like FreeDB mostly sucked.
I haven't played much with MusicBrainz yet, but I think that it's worth to give it a chance.

Even if Gracenote has a great database, even if it's now part of Sony, there are a lot disadvantages with the service too.

Very high licensing fees as well as a pretty bloated SDK, that's the impression I got when I looked at all of the crash reports in the forums which are related to the Gracenote SDK or when I look at the large number and large file size of the libraries which are required for that service.

What a relief finding this post. I redid two desktops and when reinstalled Winamp doesn't work right any more. I have been trying for about a week to find out what I did wrong. Tried different versions, many, with same results. Is everyone in the same boat or just people who reinstalled. I am very sorry if I'm asking already answered questions but didn't want to read every post. I first noticed when I put in a commercial "store bought" CD and no track info, then also no auto tag for mp3s. Also won't autoplay CDs and will only play MP3 cds when I open files and manually drag them to Winamp. I am assuming all of these are from the same problem. I am a LONG time winamp user and it is the best. You can (could) do some many operations from the same program. Awesome. Many, many thanks to Dr. O and all the other team people for your posts. Saved me huge amount of time. Just sorry that such a great program had to end. Finally is there any way to get notified When winamp comes back

Also won't autoplay CDs and will only play MP3 cds when I open files and manually drag them to Winamp.

that is not related and is probaby that you've not got Winamp correctly associated to play CDs (which depends on the OS as how to do that). though MP3 CDs will not be auto-played if i remember correctly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by dennis tuohy

Just sorry that such a great program had to end.

it's not ended, it's just changed from one owner to another and it's going to take a while for a new version to be provided - which really is no more different than the time between the v5.63 and v5.64 releases which was a bit over a year. so if anything, that time between builds is more of an ending than what is the case now (it's just most people aren't going to see anything until the end of the year as long as i can code fast enough...).

Gracenote had worked very well for me, and on occasion even noticed that it was album-aware, in that when I tagged a whole mix/collection at once, it noticed that, and recognised the set as being this mix collection - not just treating them as individual songs.

Some of us may not be fully aware of the bulk-edit facility in Winamp available through Ctrl-E. I wasn't aware of it for a time, anyway. If you select a number of tracks, press Ctrl-E you can put in entries for the whole group at once e.g. artist, album, genre. Hope this may help.

All great things must come to an end i suppose, and CDDB was THE greatest of great things to me :'(

As my previous posts show, the Autotag feature was the main and for a time the only reason i used Winamp, it was the reason i eventually got hooked to Winamp and the reason why my annoyingly large media library is no longer filled with "unknown track" or "track 01" or with horribly incomplete metadata or non at all.

I really hope however way Winamp decides to implement MusicBrainz is better than the pain in the ass way MusicBrainz's own client Picard does. Maybe the same way the Autotagger currently is but with improvements? (like being able to have multiple choices for one)
And hopefully not limited to being capable of searching just by the album name, since the album field is usually the tag field thats never everrrr filled in mp3's.

Ive gone through pretty much every tagging app with online DB functionality there is and Picard has to be by far one of the worst, if not THE worst in usability. That was in 2011, since then ive heard theyve bought something similar to Gracenote's ability to detect a song's acoustic fingerprint to identify it, i guess that gives it an edge over FreeDB which arguably isnt as sparse as MusicBrainz since FreeDB has been around as long as CDDB has iirc.

For those who still want to use Gracenote's service, theres five options.

Theyve recently had their own internal limbo like Winamp has and almost shutdown, now theyre back, and their service still works, however their client isnt how i remember it being, iirc it used to have the ability to give you multiple choices in the gracenote results, or maybe not.... But anyways, this one also gets you album art from amazon.
Its downside is... wait for it..... wait for it.... that without iTunes it wont work. Supposedly it can work with Windows Media Player but personally thats never worked for me (but then again the last time i tried it with WMP was in 2011)

Its pretty much the ultimate iTunes plugin you could say, plus it shows you when the artist youre listening to is having a concert near your location so that could be a boon to wash away the pains of knowing youll need iTunes to use it.

Oh yeah, and its shareware. you can buy it or pay a yearly subscription to it.

The competitor of TuneUp, also requires iTunes. costs 50$. However i used to use this to get album art for all the songs id tagged from Winamp's Autotagger, together they were a perfect match. I havent really used it much for Autotagging, but since it uses Gracenote too i guess the results should be the same. Personally i prefer this.

However their page havent seen any activity since 2011~ so i do get worried that the Tagging aspect of this app may go kaput soon too D: But then again, the company is owned by RealNetworks so they prolly have the cash to let that app work for some time.

3) iTunes itself

Ive never tried this since it requires an iTunes account and i dont have one, but in iTunes's context menu next to each song theres an option called "Get Track Names" and another option called "Get Album Art". Your milage may vary with those since im not sure if they rely on Gracenote or the iTunes store, but either way it still beats nothing

*Another way to do it using iTunes that DOES use Gracenote and and doesnt need an iTunes account would be to burn the music files you want to work on to a CD, then rip it using iTunes, iTunes will then attempt to retrieve its tags in a manner similar to the way Winamp used to. (however with this method, remember you'll be loosing audio quality since it will have to reencode your songs)

Just like with the above mentioned iTunes method, in MediaGo's context menu it lets you lookup the metadata of a song within its library. Bare in mind that MediaGo isnt exactly a media player so this method probably sucks ass if its anything like i remember it to be.

5) Gracenote's plugin for Nero

Honestly i have no idea how this works since ive never tried it, but a previous poster on this thread mentioned it and ive known about it too so it might be worth a try. No idea if its just for looking up CD's when you rip them or if it can be used on mp3 files though.

R.I.P Autotag, you were the reason i loved and got into Winamp in the first place </3

Hi everybody
I've been using Winamp since the early days of 2.8 version (2002) and rarely used the Gracenote recognition tool, mainly because the results were not relevant.
When mass tagging, I use Tag & Rename,which takes its informations from Freedb and Amazon data bases.
Each of my files includes the album cover, thanks to Google and ecover.to.
So I won't cry if gracenote doesn't work anymore, I found it useful only in the case of totally unknown tracks.
But this is of course only my own opinion, based on the way I use winamp. The needs of other users may be quite different.
However, thanks to the "new" developpers for their time and effort.

1. I am glad you are out from under AoL.
2. I am very pleased to hear about the issue. I have been searching for a while for information about the non-functioning auto tag. I do understand the challenges and am grateful that you and the rest of the team are working hard on replacing the feature. It is very missed.

I have been searching for a program that can be used to look up the tag information and nothing compares to the WinAmp feature in simplicity and accuracy. Metatogger v5.1 has some nice features but its data base is limited and often cannot find the basic info of Artist and Title which is all that it seems to search for. Genre is also important as is the artwork.

Thank you and the rest of the staff there for your dedication to improve WinAmp and keeping it alive. It has been my favorite music program for many many years. Like so many others I would like it working again 'now', but proper coding takes time and we are looking at a total rewrite of the code, I do hope you keep the looks and ease of use of WinAmp in tact. What WinAmp does not need is a rushed, bug filled release (We have Microsoft Windows for that sort of thing ) Also, thank you for staying up to keep us informed about this issue.

Well bloody hell.
Winamp's was a really easy setup and contrary to some of the things I read while researching this issue, I've had only positive experiences(as in accurate) with the auto-tag feature and the gracenote DB under it.

Some one asked if there was another music player that may have auto tagging that was nearly as good as what winamp had. Ok folks....Go lookup Music Bee. It looks and feels much like winamp or what winamp should be now. It has tons of tagging features. It's auto tagging looks good. It reads from MusicBrainz and CDDB. Maybe one or two other sources as well. If Album covers are important for tags, you can have it look up album covers and it will give you several choices and ways to incorporate them in your tags. I really think that DrO should give Music Bee a try and look how things are done in it. I've been using winamp for about 10 years and Music Bee is the first player that may make me leave winamp.

I took a quick look (about an hour) and Music Bee does have a similar look and feel to that of the Bento UI. The tagging features are powerful and extensive. It appears as if Music Bee is trying to combine all the best features of the major competition, but the sound of my mp3s is nowhere near as good. This is because I've spent a lot of time over the years finding and setting up a mix of audio enhancing Winamp plug-ins that provide a sound better than any other app I've tried.

For me, the sound quality is the most important thing. Maybe I could tinker with Music Bee and get it to sound the same, but it's not worth the effort at this time. I will keep it installed for the tagging. Thank you for mentioning it.

WinAmp is failing its patrons. What is the point of a computer audio player if it can't get our CD information? ASSUMING that everyone is primarily like me, and that we all PURCHASE our music, as opposed to PIRATING, wouldn't WinAmp APATHETICALLY IGNORING this issue nullify HALF of the PURPOSE of the PROGRAM?

I downloaded that mp3tag. But there was no option to read a CD! I opened the program, and it would let me drag and drop files in there....but not from a CD. I'm sorry, but why on Earth would I want to rip the CD BEFORE I GET THE FILE INFO? Uh, yeah, I think I'd like my music information kind of THERE before I put it on my computer, yeah? Kind of common sense.

Final Note: WINAMP should have their OWN Song Information Gathering Software.

first of all, EAC and other apps will rip CDs with the info, mp3tag is NOT for ripping CDs.

secondly, Winamp WILL get the ability to rip CDs with the info back ASAP. it is TOTALLY reasonable that when they were SOLD they had to redo their deals, and switch out massive amounts of code, and that takes a LOT of time.

Winamp (not WinAmp as that hasn't existed for well over a decade) is not intentionally trying fail its users and I've tried to explain as best as possible what has happened, why it has happened and what we aim to do.

also it's not like its not possible to manually enter the information and as I always had to "correct" the information which was pulled down, I doubt it makes that much difference in time to input things (unless you were just assuming its all good and just blindly accepted the data).

rushing a fix is not going to help either and as I've done numerous times now, I can only apologise again and at least things are in a position where a fix can come (since if Winamp hadn't been sold, other than trying to reverse engineering things and patch that way, there would have been no option of a fix).

and although we've said a number of things, we may now also consider other options for data look up as a means to try to ensure that something will always be able to provide the best information which can be done, which adds more time to getting a working solution (which due to other things needed in the plater may take longer than initially intended). as its not that simple to provide a single dll / plug-in to alter the lookup aspects needed to get this (and other gracenote based features in the player working again).

Final Note: WINAMP should have their OWN Song Information Gathering Software.

Do you honestly expect a service to pop out of nowhere and have the song information of billions upon billions of songs? Theres already 3 main databases out there, 2 of which are open to the public for free. If theres even more databases and users submitting to each of them then it only causes more harm because then information would be scattered across so many different places.

Winamp is in transition currently, none of this stuff was expected or planned so its all sudden for everyone.

and although we've said a number of things, we may now also consider other options for data look up as a means to try to ensure that something will always be able to provide the best information which can be done, which adds more time to getting a working solution (which due to other things needed in the plater may take longer than initially intended). as its not that simple to provide a single dll / plug-in to alter the lookup aspects needed to get this (and other gracenote based features in the player working again).

that's interesting DrO, so are you saying you are considering a system like EAC has where you can use different plugins to do look ups? (each plugin has its own prefs btw) I really like that if so!

with EAC, i normally use the freedb plugin, b/c that one cues the art lookup as well, but the CTDB plugin looks up multiple sources, including freedb, it just for some reason doesn't cue the art lookup (which i think is an oversight).

Final Note: WINAMP should have their OWN Song Information Gathering Software.

If they would do it, the database would be empty on start and people must fill it (the same thing which happened years ago with Gracenote, it's only as good, because million of people sent data over the years).

And who will fill the database then, people like you, who are expecting that anything just must work for free?

That's the downside of nearly any online servive, it can be dead over night, hence that's why i never would use any cloud service etc. Gracenote is a commercial company > no license = no cd lookups.

I think there is no need to apologize, DrO explained a few times, why it isn't working anymore, you can live with it and wait for a newer Winamp version, or you can use an alternative cd ripper. That's up to you.

MrSinatra: how can I comment on something when I'm not online...? I don't know what will be done as its still at the pre-planning stage and is just thoughts on how to reduce being reliant on a single service (as we were and due to that we are now in this mess).

info lookup can still come from CD text or the existing CD cache which Winamp made so it could be coming from either of those sources.

and whoever suggested echonest, I think you'll need to forget that as an option (is all I can say on the matter).

after 2 days away from home, i fancied having a weekend to myself for a change, hence only replying today. and i really need to step back from posting on the forum so much anyway so i can focus more on coding, so we'll see if i can (now i've caught on things from the last 5 days), focus more time on coding than trying to answer posts...

I use Winamp for years, and my fave tool in it was the "Auto-tag", I noticed it was not working, but I was thinking it was some issue that would be fixed soon, but seems that it won't...
Anything similar to Auto-tag? I use it to write the correct name in the songs, so I need something that is good like Winamp one was, thanks!

I was wondering if my computer was having issues!! I'm glad that there is a team that is going to keep Winamp alive! I just wish someone could pick-up the CATraxx and CATvids programs to keep those alive. Any chance, DrO, if you all could do that? I'd even pay for the upgrades as I purchased the competing product and it was the most user un-friendly program I have ever used.

Gracenote was the best auto-tagging program ever invented.I have stacks of cds that windows media player rips as "unknown".Gracenote and winamp have NEVER let me down.
Gracenote correctly tagged a cd that was only released on computer burned discs(and only 200 were made).A cd that google had 0 results for when i searched.
It correctly tagged magazine give aways from the 90s and even tons of files that had NO info in the properties.
I hope the new service is good but i don't see how it can ever compare.
It's a sad day in music history.

Gracenote was the best auto-tagging program ever invented.I have stacks of cds that windows media player rips as "unknown".Gracenote and winamp have NEVER let me down.
Gracenote correctly tagged a cd that was only released on computer burned discs(and only 200 were made).A cd that google had 0 results for when i searched.
It correctly tagged magazine give aways from the 90s and even tons of files that had NO info in the properties.
I hope the new service is good but i don't see how it can ever compare.
It's a sad day in music history.

it has been explained to death now why it's not working, what is intended to be done, and that there's a hell of a lot of things that need to be done (not only on this aspect, but other areas to have a non-AOL version) before a new Winamp client can be released. we know it's not what people want, but neither is a half-baked rushed solution which would be the case if something was put out now (along with a number of key aspects of the player not working anyway if taken from what's currently being worked on).

I agree it is no fun having to learn a new program just to have files tagged automatically, but for now there is no alternative.

You can also post on the Mp3tag site, explain exactly what you want to do and ask for help.

While it's true that the learning curve for MP3tag is high, it's also just about the best tagging software you'll ever find!

For one thing, you have the choice of using freedb, Amazon.com (or Amazon.de. The developer is German), discogs, or MusicBrainz for auto-tagging! You can even use a locally cached copy of the the freedb database.

However, for all that it gives you such a wide choice of auto-tagging solutions, the program is mostly focused on manual tagging.

Not manual in the sense of typing in field after field. Manual in the sense that it's main focus isn't auto-tagging.

The strength of the program is the ability to use regular expressions to update hundreds of tags at once, to do bulk conversions, such as converting all ID3v1 tags to your choice of ID3v2 (ID3v2.4 UTF-8, ID3v2.3 UTF-16, ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1) or APEv2 tags, and even linking in external programs to work directly from its own menus.

So, while I highly recommend the program, I don't think it's a viable solution for the CDDB issue.